The Listener (9 page)

They all climbed over into the motor launch, and he sat down on the middle seat, drew his head down between his shoulders, and waited. The engine started slowly, coughed and spluttered, and then, with a lot of heavy gasping, set itself to rights and the boat arched out of the bay. As soon as they poked their nose beyond the point, the whole grey sea swept over them, the launch rolled wildly and unpredictably, a helpless feeling until the boat and the sea got used to each other. Nordman and Weckström sat on either side of him on the middle seat, as solid as stone and smelling of wet wool. Gradually the boat began adjusting to the waves, which vaulted towards them and vanished giddily behind. Sometimes the boat stopped and shuddered from bow to stern before the screw grabbed hold again and the engine went back to work, defiantly, belts galloping. The sky above the waves had grown brighter. They were approaching the skerry with the great boulder that was a landmark from the east.

He’s going to blow it up. He’ll light the fuse and the flames will creep along fast, and he’ll stand and look at it and then turn and run! No more landmark. Heaven and earth will fly apart and, later, people will come to the skerry and step ashore and shake their heads and say, “This is where it happened.”

The tiny inlet was not a good spot for the boat, but they had to tie up somewhere. At least there was a cable running across it, and the stern line ought to hold. Nordman hooked a grapnel to the cable, which sank low under the weight and then went taut with each swell. “Keep an eye on it,” he said to his son. “If it starts swinging, that’s not good. If it flies straight up, we’ll have to go back.”

They took the crowbar and the box of dynamite and walked onto the skerry. Holger sat down on the granite and kept an eye on the grapnel. The launch jerked forwards with each wave and then lurched back again, pulling on the lines. The grapnel rose and dipped back down towards the water with each breaker, but it didn’t swing. He watched it the whole time.

He couldn’t see the boulder from down here. Will they shout or just run? How am I supposed to know when it happens?

Now Nordman started up the drill and went to work in a frenzy. The noise swallowed the wind and the waves. He held the heavy drill at an angle against the rock. He grimaced with the effort and showed his teeth. Rock dust flew about his ears, and the drill bounced and tried to find a hold, screaming in his hands. Nordman knew precisely what it could do and what it would tolerate.

Weckström sat and twisted together blasting charges.

It might be that the whole thing was a huge and terrible mistake. If the world’s biggest boulder sat on a skerry
way out at sea, then it was probably God in his infinite benevolence who’d put it there. And then, the boy thought, then along comes Nordman. He doesn’t care what God has decided. He looks at the boulder and says, This has to go!

The wind had eased. The grapnel was dipping less and less but he kept his eye on it steadily.

A little past eight o’clock, Nordman took the boy with him to the other side of the island and showed him an overhang where he could wait. “Crawl in there,” he said. “And don’t move. We’ve got another place. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded with his hand in front of his mouth. He went in under the overhang and waited.

He doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m afraid. I’m not the one who gets blown up or sinks into deep, grey water. He’s the one we wait for, who might never come home.

The detonation was short and muffled, a great animal growling in its sleep.

The boy shouted out loud and ran straight out onto the bare granite where he waited for the debris. And it came, fragments rained down all around him, the reality exactly like his picture of reality. There they came, saw-toothed and sliceful, heavy lumps of granite and narrow shards like spears, but they were all for him, for him and no one else. Invulnerable, he watched the fragments lay themselves to rest all around him in the order that Nordman had ordained.

A
CTUALLY, THERE'S NOTHING
the matter with him except that he's so terribly nice. Maybe that's natural for a big endomorph like Lucio, but it doesn't seem to me that endless, almost heart-breaking niceness of that kind can be natural for a person who has had so many disappointments. I heard about those indirectly, not from him; he never talks about himself. I really don't believe I've ever heard him make any voluntary statement about anyone he knows or has ever known or been introduced to. It creates an empty space around him.

Of course we all love Lucio. But it's an affection that borders on despair and can even cross over into irritation.

Through his job at the Institute, he meets a great many people, and most of them consider themselves his friends after one or two encounters. That's not surprising. In every respect, Lucio meets people's expectations, no, their dearest hopes, for what they will find in a friend. Just the way he talks and listens, the way he looks at you and smiles, seems to promise an unswerving dependability.
And, believe me, one can really depend on Lucio. He is unswervingly loyal, interested, and helpful. But there are times when he completely withdraws.

Let me put that another way. The fact is that friends everywhere are constantly commenting on their other friends. With amusement, and often with love, they talk about each other's failings and peculiarities, quite simply about what their friends have said and done. A large part of all normal social life consists quite naturally of precisely this. There's no malice in it. No one would ever tell tales or make remarks in the presence of strangers that would be unthinkable. Anyway, on such occasions, Lucio withdraws. He pulls back into a kind of perplexed silence and looks down at the table. He smiles to show that his silence is not in any way reproachful. Nevertheless, you feel almost if you'd been guilty of a betrayal. And then, when the conversation turns to other topics, he lights up with such gratitude that it's almost embarrassing.

Now I don't want to paint a misleading picture of Lucio. He's not afraid of having opinions, and he defends them vehemently and happily, maybe not so much to persuade as simply to speak, to form words. His Swedish is excellent, but slow, and his choice of words is somewhat dramatic. Lucio always chooses the prettiest synonym and gives the most quotidian things a kind of melodious exaggeration, which is maybe why we don't always take him seriously. But as I said, it is only personal matters – remarks about human behaviour – that silence him. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to find things to talk about.

We see quite a lot of him, and I think we all make it clear how much we like him. I'm always amazed that he has time for so many things and yet never seems to be rushed or tired, and he always seems to have time to talk when you call him.

Every time I visit him at home, I think of chestnuts, shiny brown and white inside. I filled my pockets with them as a boy. His whole apartment is painted white, with heavy, dark-brown pieces of furniture here and there – chests and straight-backed chairs and tables that are too high and too narrow. Even Lucio's pictures are dark brown, and I could swear that he constantly polishes all of it with nut oil. We often joke about it – with great affection. Once I looked into his bedroom while he was mixing drinks in the kitchen, and, sure enough, Lucio slept in a big dark, brown bed with four tall, turned bedposts, utterly matrimonial. His eyes are the same dark, polished colour and express a disconcerted gentleness, but oddly enough he's completely bald. He ought to have long brown hair.

Lucio greets people quietly and without any kind of excess, and yet he gives everyone to believe that no meeting on earth could have given him greater pleasure. Although Lucio uses a dramatic vocabulary, we realise that it's pretty much a lexical phenomenon, so we
automatically
translate to what he really and truly means. And nevertheless he gives the impression that at any moment he might burst into song or throw his arms around you – in other words, go overboard. It makes us nervous and leads us to speak too openly and with larger adjectives than are really called for.

Lucio is always too cold. His apartment is full of heaters. He's bought himself a big wolfskin hat and tries to amuse us by pulling down the earflaps and growling. We laugh every time. He often does it at the wrong parties and when the parties are just starting. Lucio drinks
practically
nothing, perhaps a little wine with dinner. Despite his more or less natural melancholy, Lucio is a cheerful person, and he can get almost boisterous if something really amuses him. Of course we tell him funny stories (though never about sex). It's such a pleasure to watch his tense, expectant face and his boundless joy at the punch line. “That's priceless!” he cries. “How can you remember so many jokes?” Lucio never tells anecdotes himself. Come to think of it, he never tells stories of any kind but rather ruminates and comments. His intense attentiveness is less about people than about the things and day-to-day events that surround them. I'm thinking of when the conversation glides into history or antique furniture, politics, religion, or, say, deep-sea fishing or the art of gardening in the eighteenth century, whatever; then he leaps into the discussion with great enthusiasm. But he never brings up topics of that kind. He waits. Lucio reminds me of a dog, waiting alertly in
concentrated
, patient expectation – and then you throw the stick and the dog runs off in wild joy to bring it back.

I envy Lucio his incredible curiosity and enthusiasm, which he has managed to retain into middle age. But there are times when I'm embarrassed by his puerile amazement at what goes on in the world. He still can't get used to the fact that people travel to the moon. “Can
you believe it?!” he says, lowering his voice. “They're walking around up there – on the moon! They bring home rocks!” His face is tight with astonishment and wonder. He leans forwards and touches my knee, and in a rare outburst of intimacy he tells me how he stood on Brunnspark Hill and waited, that cold winter when the Russians sent up their dog Laika into space. “I saw it pass overhead,” he says quietly. “It was terribly cold, and people stood like black tombstones in the snow, one here, one there, waiting, and they all saw it. It was such a tiny light, and it moved so slowly, so high above us, arching past us in a great, long curve. It was a miracle.” He opens his eyes wide and pulls in his lips and stares at me breathlessly as if he had told me some huge secret.

Or he can say, “Don't you find it touching that things start growing again every spring? New green leaves come out in the same places as before?”

Now, don't misunderstand me. Lucio isn't really naïve. He's very smart and can show real critical intelligence. Maybe it's just a question of his unusual capacity for astonishment. Sometimes when his telephone rings late in the evening and he looks at the instrument, absently and perplexedly, I could swear that he's not wondering who could be calling so late but that he's quite simply amazed at the wonderful, magical fact that a telephone can ring and convey a conversation.

It occurred to me once that we should take care of Lucio, worry about him. And, at the same time, I felt certain that none of us got as much fun out of life as he did. His childishness, if I may call it that, was completely
unconscious, and as a result he wasn't able to use it to get things or avoid things, and least of all to make an impression, with the result that it was seen and accepted as charm.

It's difficult to describe Lucio now, afterwards. One thought that occurs to me is that he never talked about Italy. Why didn't he? Maybe we should have asked him about Italy.

Early on, we used to play with Italian expressions, little Italian jokes and profanities, and we'd say
Ciao
when we saw him, all of it a way of showing affection and respect. But Lucio didn't like it. He'd smile and go quiet. And sometimes there were long periods when Lucio was melancholy. He didn't turn off his phone, he welcomed us as usual, and nothing was really different except that he was sort of
playing
Lucio, if you know what I mean. He was lifeless, absent. He erected a polite façade that resembled friendliness and he tried hard in every way, but without enthusiasm. Lucio was just not Lucio.

So we left him in peace. I don't know what it was that depressed him. Sometimes I think it was the newspapers, the things happening in the world. Maybe he was homesick or missed someone who was far away. Or maybe he was just reaching the age when you suddenly look around and realise that life didn't turn out the way you'd expected. I don't know. And Lucio had so clearly and in every way shown us that he didn't want to talk about personal matters. When the mood passed, he'd start wearing his wolfskin hat again, an amusing sign that everything was back to normal.

One time I tried to cheer up Lucio by taking him cross-country skiing. We went out together and bought his equipment, and he was incredibly interested. It was a very cold Sunday, and we skied some way across the ice on the southern harbour. Of course, he wasn't doing so well, but he shuffled along behind me as best he could, straight out to where there was a boat frozen in the ice, which seemed to me a reasonable objective. When we got there, he was blue in the face and could hardly speak. “It's intoxicating,” he said. “Wonderful to see. A lonely icebreaker that has itself been captured by the ice!” When we finally got home, do you know what he'd done? He had managed to fasten his bindings over his ankles, above the boot, so of course he had sores. Why couldn't he have asked or said something? But maybe he thought it was supposed to hurt.

You had to keep an eye on him constantly. He was forever making mistakes and getting cheated. Lucio's mistakes must have been gigantic back when he was courting and marrying women. Despite his reticence in such matters, it sometimes happened that I mentioned my own relationships, and he'd say, finally, very softly, “But she was so young and uncertain.” Always the same thing, young and uncertain, or middle-aged and uneasy, or all the other things women can be. He always had an explanation. I know there's an explanation for
everything
, but insight isn't the same thing as forgiveness. And forgiveness doesn't have to mean that you forget. But Lucio forgot. He really couldn't recall the injustice and bitterness that accumulate around a life. We saw
evidence of that again and again, first with suspicion but eventually with devoted relief.

Of course, we never intentionally treated him badly.

Giving Lucio presents was fun. He was always so surprised and pleased, and he showed it without your having to disparage your own gift. He never seemed to feel weighed down by gratitude, and it never occurred to him to rush out and get a present or do you some favour in return. When he did do such things, it was by chance, in passing, and he would laugh out loud if you showed you were pleased.

Now, as I try to tell you about Lucio, it's hard to understand what it was about him that we sometimes found so irritating. Not only before but especially after spending time with him, I always had a strong feeling of expectation that could last for hours. When I then try to recall what he had said, his tone of voice, his silences, his eyes, everything that had given our conversation its special character, all of it evaporated and grew unreal, like a story in a book. It was vaguely annoying. No, it was an odd feeling of helplessness – as if I'd missed or forgotten something important. It's hard to describe.

I don't know why he attached himself so exclusively to us, but I'm sure he knew that we loved him. Friendship is such a serious thing that it's hard to talk about. I've tried. But I'm afraid that I've only succeeded in explaining a fraction of the excruciating, devoted, and somewhat distant friendship between ourselves and Lucio Giovanni Marandino.